What is a Light-Year?
The light-year is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances. It is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers or 5.88 trillion miles and has the symbol ly.
As defined by International Astronomical Unit (IAU), a light-year is a distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year ( 365.25 years).
The light-year is most often used when expressing distances of stars and other distances on a galactic scale.
Because it includes the word "year", the term light-year is sometimes misinterpreted as a unit of time.
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